Read Online The Half-Child by Angela Savage - Free Book Online

three Thai women in the vehicle, one bouncing a chubby infant on her lap. Jayne took a seat at the end of the bench on the right side where she had a view out the back.
    The songthaew headed west along a road lined with billboards plugging beer, shampoo, petrol, mobile phones and ‘Tiffany’s: The Original Transvestite Cabaret Show New Extravaganza’. Turning left at a roundabout with a dolphin fountain at its centre, they cruised south along
    the coast road, following the curve of Pattaya Bay. The songthaew pulled over to let off the Thai woman and her baby. Jayne got her first good look at the beach. She took in a grubby strip of sand dotted with coconut palms and large-leafed hu khang trees. Tourists lazed on wooden sun lounges beneath umbrellas that stretched as far as she could see. Vendors trawled the sand with baskets of fruit on their heads, sarongs draped over their arms, and seafood grilling in metal bowls dangling from poles across their shoulders.
    A sinewy Thai woman massaged the back of a fleshy blonde in a leopard print bikini. Her companion was having her toenails painted. The whine of distant jet-skis could be heard above the idling songthaew engine. They took off again and Jayne turned her attention to the opposite side of the road, a stretch of open-fronted beer bars, guesthouses, hotels and go-go clubs with a 7-Eleven every fifty paces. The bars had names that ranged from corny—Happy Friend, Lovely Corner, We Are The World Beer Bar—to bawdy. Among the latter, Jayne liked Shaggers for its simplicity. Despite the mid-afternoon sun, the bars were more crowded than the beach, and Jayne noted with a wry smile that where Thai women were concerned, the beach was for covering up, the bars for bikinis.
    The trip continued through Central Pattaya past more beer bars, a dive centre, a couple of shopping plazas. Two more farang men descended at Soi Pattayaland 2, aka ‘Boyz Town’, the town’s busiest gay zone, before the songthaew turned left into South Pattaya Road and headed away from the beach. Jayne lost her bearings for a few minutes as they zigzagged up the cliff, but caught sight of the Bayview Hotel and pressed the button on the roof to bring the songthaew to a stop.
    A young Thai woman in high-cut denim shorts, pink singlet and diamante-studded sunglasses watched Jayne get out. In one of those moments when Jayne wished she couldn’t speak the language, the woman turned to her friend and in a voice loud enough to be heard over the engine asked, ‘What do you think a fat farang like her is looking for in Pattaya?’

6
    J ayne could see why Maryanne chose the Bayview Hotel. It was a cliff-top sanctuary dividing the sleaze of Pattaya in the north from Jomtien in the south, a quieter stretch billed as ‘family oriented’ with a gay beach at one end and a large Russian presence at the other.
    The hotel had two distinct sections: the White Wing, a modern tower of ‘deluxe’ and ‘superior’ rooms; and the Green Wing, an older, low-rise guesthouse with a dozen ‘standard’ rooms. Judging from the liberal use of Formica and round feature windows, Jayne dated the Green Wing circa 1960; the White Wing was still so new the paintwork had barely begun to blister.
    The Green Wing was not so much surrounded as encroached upon by a tropical garden: the rooms smelled of damp, liana vines crept through the air-vents, and palms jostled against the balcony railings like Triffids. The White Wing by contrast was surrounded by a belt of neat lawn, interrupted only by two large umbrella trees that survived the renovation.
    Jayne knew from her file notes that Maryanne had rented a room in the Green Wing after a short-lived experiment in a flat on her own. The apartment was in what they call a condo , she wrote home to her parents. All the neighbours were sleazy European men with much younger Thai girlfriends (or boyfriends!). I came home one night and found